Wrongful Convictions - Death Penalty and Innocence - Essay Example

"If we execute murderers and there is in fact no deterrent effect, we have killed a bunch of murderers. If we fail to execute murderers, and doing so would in fact have deterred other murders, we have allowed the killing of a bunch of innocent victims…

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I would much rather risk the former. This, to me, is not a tough call." Professor John McAdams, Marquette University Law is one of the most intricate aspects of socio-political life; it revolves around the life of individuals and helps them coexist in tandem with one another. It is based on a philosophy as talked about by eminent thinkers and its very features emanate a sort of philosophical thinking on the basis of what law exactly is. Law generates human behaviour and is answerable for the actions of the people; it thus control and regulates the manner in which people exist around each other and thus, it poses an intellectual question as to how it carries out the same function. Within a society thus, if people commit crimes or harass others and intrude upon their peaceful living, they are bound to be punished, and since times immemorial, one of the worst punishments that a person may be given is a death penalty. The definition of the term death penalty is ‘putting a condemned person to death’. (Definition - Death Penalty). This means that if a person kills someone, in most cases, he himself will get sentenced to death. At the same time, it is pertinent to note that many countries around the world have abolished the charge of a death penalty to their citizens despite the heinous acts that they may commit. Other countries, for example, India, still make use of the death penalty in the rarest of rare cases. Current trends in the United States of America suggest that the death penalty is administered to people committing crimes ranging from drug trafficking to aggravated murder, and one of the most common forms of the execution involves the use of a lethal injection which has been opposed by numerous human rights groups. In 2011 itself, 43 executions have taken place with the lethal injection (Facts About Death Penalty). However, there are many states within the US, for example, Michigan, Hawaii, and Alaska, which have banned the death sentence altogether. In America, there is acclaimed public support for death penalties as well because the people believe in truly punishing those that commit grave crimes like murders. Since the 1980s, this trend seems to be in the proposition of the public. Michigan was the first state with an English-speaking government that banned the death sentence for all crimes except for treason. Giving any individual the death penalty is a tough task to process because it involves pin pointing a certain crime onto a person that has shocked all of society; since the punishment depends on the gravity of the crime committed, it is pertinent to understand the reason for giving a death penalty in many parts of the world even today. However, according to personal opinion, the death penalty should only be reserved for the worst crimes and the rarest of rare cases because as discussed within this paper, it is difficult to segregate the innocent people from those that are indeed guilty and wrongfully giving the death penalty will result in creating many more criminals rather than fix the society. Causes of Wrongful Conviction Eyewitness error The memory of an individual may be either blurry or deceive him especially when it comes to remembering events that may have occurred in the past, especially with respect to other individuals. In the case of a rape and kidnapping, a man in Florida, Alan Crotzer, was wrongfully convicted to a long time in prison, awaiting a decision when he had not committed a crime at all, despite the eyewitnesses stating the facts as him being the criminal (Stutzman, R). According to the
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...in Pennsylvania alone, there are ineffective defense attorneys who fail to conduct satisfactory investigations to support their clients. This has lead to conviction of innocent suspects, especially those involved in complicated cases (Hood and Hoyle 105). Many cases are confirmed that some lawyers made mistakes and the judges have made rulings based on their findings. It is also argued that deathpenalty is barbaric form of punishment. Paternoster and Bacon state that all forms of deathpenalty are unfair (55). In exemplifying this, the argument states, whether it is through lethal injection, hanging, using the firing squad or electric...

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...have been committed against an innocent person. This is compounded even further in areas with the deathpenalty and an innocent person is sentenced to die for a crime that society later discovers they did not have anything to do with. There is another side to this issue as well, which covers the reality that truly guilty people go free in exchange for an innocent person taking their place (Tan, 2011). Naturally, we cannot throw away law and justice because of errors that are made, but we can certainly move towards a deeper understanding of the impact made by wrongfulconvictions and realize the importance of minimizing...

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